STEVE Kaplan

PERFORMING ARTS / FILM & VIDEO / SCREENWRITING $26.95 USA / $35.95 CAN

Kaplan
Turning The Zero The Comic
HERO’S
INTO THE HERO!

the comic HERO’S journey

journey
WE’VE ALL HEARD ABOUT THE HERO’S JOURNEY. But what about
the protagonist in a comedy? While other books give you tips on
how to “write funny,” The Comic Hero’s Journey details the crucial
differences between comedy-film story structure and the dramatic
Hero’s Journey. Learn the diverse paths that comedy takes for anyone
wanting to write better scripts and understand more clearly what
makes film comedy work!

“Steve Kaplan gives clear principles that will help you tell comedy
stories that are funny but also emotionally engaging.”
—Chris Vogler, author, The Writer’s Journey

“I absolutely loved it! Invaluable, insightful stuff

for anyone—writer, director, producer, or executive—
who takes writing comedy seriously.”
—Lee Jessup, author, Getting It Write

“Steve sheds a brilliant light on the comedic hero. To write

a comedy script that can’t be ignored, read this book.”
—Jen Grisanti, story / career consultant; writing instructor for NBC

STEVE KAPLAN, author of the bestselling book The Hidden Tools

of Comedy, is the industry's most sought-after expert on comedy
writing and production. He has taught at UCLA, NYU, and the Yale
School of Drama; created the HBO Workspace and the HBO New
Writers Program; and was co-founder and Artistic Director of
Manhattan Punch Line Theatre. He has also taught workshops for
companies such as Disney Animation, DreamWorks, and Sony
Pictures Network India.

Serious Story Structure

for Fabulously Funny Films
MICHAEL WIESE PRODUCTIONS | MWP.COM
 For Kathrin
Otherwise, the past forty years have been a terrible mistake

Published by Michael Wiese Productions

12400 Ventura Blvd. #1111
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Cover design by Johnny Ink. www.johnnyink.com

Interior design by William Morosi
Copyediting by Ross Plotkin
Printed by McNaughton & Gunn

Manufactured in the United States of America

Copyright © 2018 by Steve Kaplan
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means
without permission in writing from the author, except for the i­nclusion of brief quota-
tions in a review.

Printed on Recycled Stock

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� vi

CHAPTER 1 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 1
The Schlemiel with a Thousand Faces

CHAPTER 2 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 7
A Guy Walks Into a Bar: The Normal World

CHAPTER 3 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 19
Dumb and Dumber . . . and Dumberer: Characters in Comedy

CHAPTER 4 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 36
WTF? or “We’re Not in Kansas Anymore”: The Comic Catalyst

CHAPTER 5 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 55
Stop the World, I Want to Get Off!: Reaction—Into New Territory

CHAPTER 6 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 77
Hooking Up: Connections, Allies, and Enemies

CHAPTER 7 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 99
“. . . There Was a Hat?”: New Directions and the Discovered Goal

CHAPTER 8 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 110

Lost at Sea: Disconnections

CHAPTER 9 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 121

“Who Ya Gonna Call?”: Racing to the Finish

CHAPTER 10������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 134

“You Had Me at Hello”: Restorations and Celebrations

CHAPTER 11������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 141

“Why a Duck?”: Q&A

ABOUT THE AUTHOR ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 166

v
1.
The Schlemiel with a
Thousand Faces

“Eagles may soar, but weasels don’t

get sucked into jet engines.”
—Steven Wright

In the beginning was the film, and the film was Star Wars.
OK, that’s not how that book goes, but it’s not a bad way to start
off this one.
This book owes a big debt of gratitude to Joseph Campbell and
his Hero With a Thousand Faces, and an even bigger debt to my friend
Chris Vogler, whose study of Campbell led to The Writer’s Journey,
his insightful melding of Campbell’s mono-myth with screenplay
structure and storytelling.
If you’ve never heard of it before, or just to refresh your memory,
The Hero’s Journey consists of:
1. Ordinary World
2. Call to Adventure
3. Refusal of the Call
4. Meeting With the Mentor
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T H E C O M I C H E R O ’ S J O U R N E Y K A P L A N

5. Crossing the First Threshold

6. Tests, Allies, and Enemies
7. Approach to the Inmost Cave
8. Ordeal
9. Reward (Seizing the Sword)
10. The Road Back
11. Resurrection
12. Return With the Elixir
If you think about Star Wars, it closely tracks the steps in
Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. Near the beginning of the film, we meet
our Hero, farm boy Luke, living in the boring old desert world of
Tatooine (Ordinary World) when he stumbles across the holographic
message from Princess Leia (Call to Adventure). Following the mes-
sage he meets with Obi-Wan Kenobi (Meeting with the Mentor) but
refuses to go to Alderaan with him (Refusal of the Call) because he
“has so much work to do” and because “it’s all so far away.”
He returns home, however, only to find that his aunt and uncle
have been murdered by the Empire’s Stormtroopers, and returns to
Obi-wan declaring that he now wants to go to Alderaan, “I want to
learn the ways of the Force and become a Jedi like my father!”
Traveling to the seedy port town of Mos Eisley (Crossing the First
Threshold), Obi-Wan enlists the help of rogue smugglers Han Solo and
Chewbacca of the Millennium Falcon, where Luke practices wielding
the Force (Tests, Allies, and Enemies). Jumping through hyperspace
to what they think is Alderaan, they discover it’s been destroyed and are
pulled aboard the Death Star (Approach to the Inmost Cave), where
in rescuing Princess Leia, they must fight off the Stormtroopers and
Darth Vader, only to face death in the trash compactor and then wit-
ness the death of Luke’s mentor Obi-Wan (Ordeal).
At the rebel base, Luke realizes his wish: he gets to be a fighter pilot
for the Rebellion. Plus, he gets a kiss on the cheek from Princess Leia!
(Reward—Seizing the Sword) Luke and the fleet return to attack the
Death Star (The Road Back), where he faces almost certain death. As
Darth Vader zeros in on Luke’s starfighter, Luke hears and heeds the
voice of Obi-Wan and becomes one with the Force as Han Solo returns
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 T he S chlemiel with a T housand F aces

just in the nick of time (Resurrection), destroying the Death Star! With
that stunning victory, Luke, Han, and Chewy mount the platform where
Princess Leia honors them for saving the Rebellion and restoring hope
to the galaxy. Luke is now a man in full (Return With the Elixir).
But you knew all that already.
So, what happens in a comedy? A comic hero or heroine also goes
on a journey. In some aspects, it’s very similar to what Chris Vogler
and Joseph Campbell write about in their books. But in many ways,
it’s quite, quite different.
When Luke’s family is killed, he bravely and solemnly vows to
“learn the ways of the Force and become a Jedi like my father.” A
comic hero would have un-bravely tried to run away so as to not get
killed. Throughout Star Wars, Luke is adventurous, brave, and stal-
wart. When he’s chasing after R2D2 and there’s the threat that the
Sand People might be about, he grabs a rif le, and with no small
amount of pluck tells C3PO, “Let’s take a look!”
Comic Heroes tend to be pluck-deficient. Vogler writes that
“heroes show us how to deal with death,” but comic heroes show us
how to deal with life. “Heroes,” according to Vogler, “accept the pos-
sibility of sacrifice,” but comic heroes have to be dragged kicking and
screaming, and even then, they try to run away from it.
In The Wizard of Oz, as Dorothy’s three companions plan to storm
the Wicked Witch’s castle the Cowardly Lion says to Tin Man and
Scarecrow outside the Wicked Witch’s castle:

COWARDLY LION
All right, I’ll go in there for
Dorothy. Wicked Witch or no Wicked
Witch, guards or no guards, I’ll tear
them apart. I may not come out alive,
but I’m going in there. There’s only
one thing I want you fellows to do.

TIN WOODSMAN, SCARECROW

What’s that?

COWARDLY LION
Talk me out of it!
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The hero decides to go on the adventure. The comic hero often

has no choice.
The hero usually has a wise old man; the comic hero often meets
an idiot who inadvertently says something that can teach him a
thing or two.

For many years (and in many places) I have taught workshops on

the Hidden Tools of Comedy, and often my students have asked me
about story structure. And the more I’ve thought about it, the more
I’ve come to realize that there is a very particular kind of story struc-
ture in comedy.
There have been a lot of books written about story structure in
feature films. I should know; many of them are written by friends of
mine. But there have been few that deal directly and explicitly with
story structure in comedies. Pablo Picasso reportedly once said that,
“Good artists create; great artists steal.” So that’s what I did—I decided
to steal (only please replace the horrid word steal with the more stately
term, pay homage to) Chris’s title, and write my own book about story
structure, but specifically as it shows up in comedic features.

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 T he S chlemiel with a T housand F aces

THE COMIC HERO’S JOURNEY

In the Comic Hero’s Journey, your protagonist goes through a trans-

formative experience as well. The steps of that are:
1. The Normal World
In the normal world, your protagonists are damaged, broken peo-
ple living in a damaged, broken world. Only they don’t know it.
They think they’re fine, they think life is perfect, that their world
is working fine, until . . .
2. WTF?
. . . the shit hits the fan, the apple cart is overturned, all hell
breaks loose—boy wakes up to find he’s a thirty-year-old man, guy
finds that every day is still Groundhog Day—and when it does,
there’s a desperate attempt to return to the Normal World in . . .
3. Reactions
This is where your protagonist at first desperately tries to put
his normal world back together. In Big, this is Tom Hanks tak-
ing a bike and riding out to where the fairground was, and then
coming back home and telling his mom, “Mom, I wished on a
fortune-telling machine and I got big!” But no one believes him,
which leads to . . .
4. Connections
In the Comic Hero’s Journey, your character starts to make con-
nections that they have never made before. Love interests, allies,
unexpected friends. And because of those connections they
go off in . . .
5. New Directions
They go off on paths they hadn’t thought about going off on
before, leading to the Discovered Goals. But just when all seems
well there’s the inevitable . . .
6. Disconnection
. . . when they break up, and it looks like all is lost. In Dodgeball,
this was when Vince Vaughn seemingly throws the game and sells
out his team. But just then there’s a revitalization and recommit-
ment to achieving the discovered goal and there’s the . . .
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7. Race to the Finish

In romantic comedy, that’s a race to the altar. That’s Dustin
Hoffman racing to the church, or Billy Crystal running through
Manhattan to try to get to the love of his life before it’s too late.
There’s always some hectic action in which the hero, the protago-
nist, and usually the protagonist’s friends and allies, desperately
try to achieve the final goal. In The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Steve
Carell realizes that no he doesn’t want to go to bed with the book-
store girl (who’s in the bathtub pleasuring herself—you had to be
there) and realizes that he really loves Catherine Keener, so he
has to race to go get her. And of course, since he doesn’t drive a
car, it’s a race to an almost disastrous finish on a bicycle.
After the race to the finish there’s the denouement or tag
or even just a beat, which gives us the sense that there’s a bet-
ter world ahead.
So, let’s get started . . .

k k k

Except, first, let me give you a caveat. This is not a formula. It’s not
a template. All these steps happen in most well-structured comedies,
but not necessarily in this order. Most people think of the low point
in a comedy as occurring about three-quarters of the way through the
film. And it does, in most films. But not in all. In Groundhog Day,
Bill Murray tries to kill himself about halfway through the movie.
In Tropic Thunder, the platoon breaks up and Ben Stiller tries to go it
alone again about halfway through. Other movies may skip or skimp
on one step or another. In most movies, all of these elements are
somewhere in the movie, but do they HAVE to be in this order? No.
There are a lot of great, idiosyncratic, atypical movies. And while
most comedies begin in the Normal World and end with Race to the
Finish, yours doesn’t need to. Your comic hero is on his or her own
journey. The routes may be similar in many ways, but as they often
say in the showroom, your mileage may vary.
So, as Philip Roth once wrote, “So. Now vee may perhaps to begin.
Yes?”

6
2.
A Guy Walks Into a Bar

THE NORMAL WORLD

“Two wrongs are only the beginning.”

—Steven Wright

LET’S START WITH THE NORMAL WORLD.

In the beginning of the Hero’s Journey, our heroes are exceptional.

Joseph Campbell writes that the adventure was not one of “discovery
but rediscovery. The godly powers sought and dangerously won are
revealed to have been within the heart of the hero all the time.” He
(or she) has hidden greatness within, but at the start, our heroes are
unaware of their undiscovered virtues. They are, as Chris Vogler puts
it, “ready to enter the world of adventure.”
However, in the Comic Hero’s Journey, your protagonist, the comic
hero, does not have greatness within. Your protagonist is as far from
greatness within as is humanly possible, and sometimes, even more
than that. He wants a “world of adventure” like he wants a hole in
the head. Your protagonist is usually a dweeb or a jerk or some other

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kind of a misbegotten misanthrope. In Big he’s bullied and not big

enough to go on a ride with the girl of his dreams. In Groundhog Day,
Bill Murray is an egotistical a-hole. In Bridesmaids, Kristen Wiig’s low
self-esteem has her sleeping with a guy she knows doesn’t like her.
In the Normal World, the comic hero’s initial state is flawed in
some vital way; there’s a hole inside them; their way of being in the
world is deeply, deeply f lawed. As Ricky Gervais has said, “No one
wants to see handsome, clever people do brilliant things brilliantly.
Who wants to see that? You want to see a putz having a go. And fail-
ing. And coming through at the end.”
At the beginning of the Normal World, the comic hero’s life does
not work, only they don’t know it! They think they’re fine, and their
world is perfect. To them, it’s the normal state of affairs and for the
most part they’ve accepted it. If you have a protagonist who comes
out in the first act and says, “You know, I . . . I’m just not doing what
I should do in life. I’m, I’m, I’m unhappy,” you’ve written a drama.
Because the more aware your characters are of their own state of
being, the more dramatic those moments are. One of the tools in
The Hidden Tools of Comedy is the idea of the Non-Hero. A Non-Hero
lacks skills. Rather than constructing a comic character by making
them the most ridiculous excuse for a person you’ve ever met (I’m
looking at you, Deuce Bigalow), a Non-Hero is simply someone who
lacks some, if not all, of the essential skills and tools with which to
accomplish their utmost goals, or just get through the day. One of
the most basic skills is awareness. Heroes have it; Non-Heroes, for
the most part, don’t.
One of the most important skills that the Non-Hero lacks is know-
ing, because a non-hero doesn’t know. Not that they’re stupid, but
they don’t know. They don’t have information. The more informa-
tion you give your characters, the more dramatic they become, the
more heroic they become. If a character is having a hard time, and
they’re aware that they’re having a hard time and they’re agonizing
over it, that’s drama. In comedies, characters are blissfully unaware.
They’re blindly going into situations. And we in the audience can see
what’s going on, but they don’t.
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 A G uy W alks I nto a B ar

Rather than the inchoate unhappiness of a dramatic hero before

he finds his quest, the comic hero is blithely unaware of what we in
the audience can see is a stacked deck against them, a f lawed exis-
tence, a screwed-up way of living.
In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray thinks that all he needs is to go
to a bigger TV station in a bigger market, but we can see that he’s
really a cynical, stunted soul, and that his way of being in the world
isn’t successful.
In Stranger Than Fiction, Will Ferrell plays an IRS agent who lacks
f lexibility, spontaneity, and is a total stick in the mud.
In Tootsie, Dustin Hoffman is a great acting teacher, and maybe
even a great actor, but who knows? No one will hire him because
he’s such an asshole. When he barges into his agent’s office, he’s
unaware that his lack of professional success might have anything
to do with himself.
In (500) Days of Summer, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is going through
the motions writing bad greeting cards; in Bridesmaids, Kristen Wiig’s
a mess with a string of failed relationships behind her; in 40-Year-
Old Virgin, he’s, uh . . . well, uh . . . dammit, he’s 40 years old and
he’s a virgin!
In the Comic Hero’s Journey, that’s the protagonist’s normal state.
And the normal state is fucked.

TRANSFORMATION

All comedy is transformational. The whole point of the Normal

World is to set up your protagonist for that eventual change. You
might think that all you need to do is put your nice, normal hero in
a crazy, fucked-up situation and see how it all shakes out. Well, don’t.
Take Groundhog Day, which I mention a lot because it’s one of my
favorite films.1 Well, in the initial draft of Groundhog Day that Danny
Rubin wrote, Phil Connors is just a nice guy that shit happens to. After
page 70, he and Rita try to figure it out. It’s seventy pages of him just

In case you’ve never seen it, you can read a summary at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_
1 

Day_(film). But really, you should just go watch it.

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getting his ass kicked for no goddamn good reason. Don’t pull wings
off of a f ly just because you can. There needs to be a reason that you,
the deity in this universe, have decided Job needs to suffer. You’re
making Job suffer. Why? If he’s already perfect, why are you torturing
this person? In the Comic Hero’s Journey, our protagonists need it.
Kristen Wiig needs to get shaken out of her rut in Bridesmaids. Phil
Connors needs to be a better person in Groundhog Day. And what a
terrific deity Phil has, who will pluck him out of space and time just
so he can be a better person. That’s some cool deity.

INITIAL GOAL

Another big difference between the classic Joseph Campbell hero and
the Comic Hero is that the classic hero often has a major overall goal
that he or she tries to accomplish throughout the course of the story.
In the Hero’s Journey, the hero usually has a goal in the beginning
and they either achieve it—happiness. Or they don’t achieve it—trag-
edy. But it’s the same goal. In the beginning Luke wants to join the
rebellion; guess what? He joins the rebellion. He saves the rebellion.
Often, the initial goal is the end goal.
In comedy, that’s not true. Many of your protagonist’s goals in the
beginning of a comedy are outer goals. These initial goals2 are usually
selfish and shortsighted and certainly are not addressing their inner
needs. (These initial goals will eventually be replaced by discovered
goals as the characters transform during the course of the narrative.)
Sandra Bullock just wants to lead a quiet life in While You Were
Sleeping. Will Ferrell in Stranger Than Fiction just wants to do his
audits and be left alone.
In Shrek, what does Shrek want? All he wants is to get the multi-
tude of fairy tale characters out of his swamp and be left alone like he

2 
Goals are specific to feature films, because goals have specific, defined ends—they’re either
achieved or not achieved. But in sitcoms, it would be wrong to assign your main characters goals.
(You don’t want the sitcom to end, you want to go into syndication!) My friend Ellen Sandler, a
genius and the author of The TV Writer’s Workbook, calls it the character’s driving force. It’s
not a goal they can achieve, it’s the force that wakes them up and gets them out of bed every day.
This driving force hopefully will propel them into and through at least 100 episodes. (Voila!
Syndication!)

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 A G uy W alks I nto a B ar

always has been. He wants to get his world back to the way it was—
his Normal World.
In the apocalyptic comedy This Is the End, the goal is for Seth
Rogen and his buddies to just ride out the last days without necessar-
ily having to change their hedonistic behavior at all. In Spy, Melissa
McCarthy is an intelligence support analyst who only wants the dash-
ing spy played by Jude Law to fall in love with her.
In 40-Year-Old Virgin, Steve Carell’s goal is simply to wake up,
go to work, come back alone, make an omelet alone, play his video
games. To him, that’s the length and breadth of his world. That’s
what he’s comfortable with, and that’s how he’s going to stay. In Tropic
Thunder, Robert Downey Jr. and Ben Stiller just want to make this
terrible Vietnam-era movie. To the Comic Hero, life is fine, and it
would be perfect if only . . .

FLAWED OR ABSENT RELATIONSHIPS

In the Normal World, there are flawed or absent relationships. If

you’re going to write a screenplay about someone who’s a worm that’s
about to turn, it’s best if you don’t start them in a happy, monogamous
relationship where everything’s going well. If you’re trying to build a pro-
tagonist who’s kind of a loser, having a supportive girlfriend or boyfriend
undercuts their ineptitude. Your hero is living in Mom’s basement,
playing Dungeons and Dragons by himself. A girlfriend? Are you kid-
ding me? If someone’s cool enough to have a girlfriend or a boyfriend,
maybe they’re not as flawed as they need to be. Even if he’s a great guy,
like in Sleepless in Seattle, make sure relationships are absent or flawed.
In Sleepless, his wife is dead. He doesn’t have or want to pursue another
relationship. In fact, it’s ruining his life, and his son is motivated to get
on the phone to call in a radio station to get him another wife.
Relationships f lawed or absent: In Forgetting Sarah Marshall,
Jason Segal’s cool girlfriend (Kristen Bell) dumps him right at the
start. In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray is kind of a misanthrope, and
all his relationships are superficial. In Bridesmaids, Kristen Wiig’s
hook-up is an obnoxious Jon Hamm, who won’t even let her sleep

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over. Steve Carell in The 40-Year-Old Virgin has no real relation-

ships except for the elderly couple with whom he shares viewing
episodes of Survivor. He doesn’t have any close friends, certainly
no female relationships.
In This Is the End, we can see that the relationship between Seth
Rogen and Jay Baruchel is deeply f lawed. Both are enjoying a mod-
erate bit of show-business success, especially Seth, who thinks that
as long as he can party hardy and do more drugs and hang out with
James Franco, his life is okay. Jay, though, expresses disdain for Los
Angeles, yet is unaware of his envy and his desire to achieve the same
show-business success that his peers are attaining. On one hand, he
doesn’t want to be like overly privileged young movie stars such as
Seth and James Franco, but he’s also jealous of them. Neither Seth
nor Jay are in good places, but the more self-aware Jay is not really
doing anything to repair his relationships.

SEEDS

The Normal World can last anywhere from five to twenty-five min-
utes, setting up your protagonist’s Normal World before the WTF,
the big event, the catalyst that’s going to send everything spinning
out of orbit.
During this time, you want to plant the seeds of conflict and
resolution and set up the conventions for the story. In an interview
with Michel Hazanavicius, the writer-director of The Artist, he states
that, “You have fifteen minutes to tell the audience, ‘These are the
rules.’ Jurassic Park teaches us to expect a T. rex, but if a T. rex comes
thirty minutes into When Harry Met Sally, you won’t believe it. So
[in The Artist] we start with the right opening credits, all together on
the page, and the narrative cards with the right font, Silentina, and
then everything follows.” Hazanavicius calls this the “grammar of
the movie,” and like grammar in writing, it’s not the content itself—
but without it, the content collapses.
Almost everything that’s going to be developed in the screenplay
needs to be dropped into the Normal World. A tenet of screenwriting

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is that if you have Act 3 problems, they’re really Act 1 problems. I agree
with that, except for the fact that every Act 2 problem is also an Act
1 problem. If you’re stuck or bolloxed up in Acts 2 or 3, it’s because
you haven’t properly prepared things in Act 1.
Everything that you want to happen, everything that you want to
pay off should be seeded, if possible, in the Normal World. A great
example of this is the opening of Back to the Future. Everything
that comes to pass and pays off in Acts Two and Three in this bril-
liantly constructed film is set up in those first five to ten pages—his
dweeby family, the audition that doesn’t go well, skateboarding.
In fact, a lot of it happens during the credits, as the camera pans
across Doc Brown’s office and laboratory and you see all the pic-
tures and articles of things that are going to come into play later on.
The camera doesn’t stop and say, “Now, pay attention to this: thirty
years ago, this happened.” But it’s there. Part of the delight of the
Robert Zemeckis movie is seeing seeds come to fruition that were
sown in the first act, in the first ten minutes, or in some cases, in
the first minute and a half.
Do not bring in a neighbor whom we’ve never met or seen before
on page 82 to start to resolve things. That’s a Deus ex Machina, the
God in the Machine. The Ancient Greeks used to end tragedies by
lowering an actor playing one of the gods down to the stage to settle
all the matters that had been bedeviling the other characters for the
first four acts. If you want to have a lightning bolt send your hero back
to the future in Act 3, you need to mention in Act 1 that the clock in
the town square was struck by lightning. Any crazy idea is great, as
long as it’s set up. We need to see how ideas are planted and germi-
nated to appreciate them when they bloom.
Sometimes it’s not feasible to plant everything in the first ten or
twenty minutes of the movie. An example of this is in Tootsie, where
the climactic live broadcast near the end of the film is set up by intro-
ducing the idea of “mistakes, retakes, and live broadcasts” in Act 2.
In this case, the protagonist doesn’t enter the world of the soap opera
until after the Normal World, but the point is to seed that informa-
tion as soon as it’s possible.
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T H E C O M I C H E R O ’ S J O U R N E Y K A P L A N

MASK TO MENSCH

One of the seeds you’ll plant in Act 1 is what we call Mask to Mensch.
Your protagonist starts off wearing a mask, a façade that hides, from
himself as well as us, the good man or woman he or she will even-
tually become—a mensch.3 Your characters are pretending, most
successfully to themselves, unaware of the possibility that there’s a
better person inside. Along the way the mask is dropped and the good
person, the mensch, emerges. Sometime during the Normal World, you
want to make sure that the audience glimpses, no matter how f leet-
ingly, the mensch behind the mask, a hint of the person they might
become. In the Normal World, we mostly see the false front. When
the mask is momentarily removed to reveal the mensch, remember
that your protagonist is unaware of it.
In the beginning of Groundhog Day, you don’t see Bill Murray hav-
ing a moment where he goes, You know, maybe if I was a better person . . .
maybe better things would happen. No. But he does have a moment early
on when he’s looking at Rita for the first time. The station manager is
telling him he has to go to Punxsutawney, but he can take Rita with
him. “She’ll be fun,” he says. And Bill Murray sees her for the first
time, and the camera pushes in and lingers on him just looking at her.
Without a quip. Without a cynical aside. In that moment, he’s no lon-
ger a jerk or an asshole. He’s just a guy looking at a girl.

3 
This concept is similar to what Michael Hauge talks about in his DVD The Hero’s Two Journeys,
in which he talks about identity and essence. But here it’s in Yiddish, so it’s entirely different.

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 A G uy W alks I nto a B ar

. . . And then it’s gone. He says, “Yeah, she’s fun . . . but not my
kind of fun.” He snaps right back to being a jerk. But for a moment,
you’ve given the audience a glimpse of who he may become and why
they should like and root for this character.
Another example is in (500) Days of Summer. In one of Tom’s
(Joseph Gordon-Levitt) first conversation with Summer (Zooey
Deschanel)—on Day 8, actually—she asks him how long he’s been
working at the greeting card company.

SUMMER
So have you worked here long?

TOM
About three . . . or four years.

SUMMER
Wow. You always wanted to write
greeting cards?

TOM
Nah, don’t even want to do it now.

SUMMER
Well, you should do something else,
then.

TOM
Yeah, I studied to be an architect
actually.

SUMMER
You did? That’s cool. What happened
there?

TOM
Didn’t work out. Eh, I needed a job
and, here we are.

SUMMER
Were you any good?

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T H E C O M I C H E R O ’ S J O U R N E Y K A P L A N

TOM
(hands her a card)
Well I wrote this one.

SUMMER
(reading)
“Today You’re a Man. Mazel Tov on
your Bar Mitzvah.”

TOM
It’s a big seller.

SUMMER
I meant as an architect?

TOM
I doubt it.

SUMMER
Well, I’d say you’re a perfectly
... adequate... greeting card
writer.

She walks back to her cubicle at the

other end of the hall.

Tom watches her walk away, completely

enamored.

He sits down at his desk and sets out to

work. But before he does, his eyes fall
on a sketch he drew of a house. It’s
dated 2001 and it’s the only architecture
sketch on his wall

Glancing across the office at Summer, Tom is inspired to begin

drawing an architectural sketch of a building, but then quickly, giving
into his internal doubts and sense of inadequacy, partially erases it,
crumples it and tosses it away. For a moment, an all-too-brief moment,
we get a sense of the man who Tom could become, before he slips on
his mask of millennial “couldn’t give a fuck.”

16
 A G uy W alks I nto a B ar

INITIAL LOSS

Like Tom’s lost dreams of being an architect, many comedies start

with, or right after, a painful initial loss. Kristen Wiig’s bakery
shop has been lost to the economic downturn at the beginning of
Bridesmaids. Tim Allen is a washed-up TV star whose sci-fi show was
cancelled years ago and whose castmates hate him in Galaxy Quest.
Riley has lost her childhood home and all her friends in Inside Out.
Disney and Pixar’s body count include Bambi and Nemo’s mother, and
Simba and Cinderella’s dad. These losses add dimension and weight
to the character, and overcoming these losses adds stature and impor-
tance to our Heroes eventual transformation and (hopefully) triumph.

THEME IMPLIED

In the Normal World, your theme is introduced, and implied or

hinted at through the dialogue, without putting your thumb too heav-
ily on the scales. (In Chapter Four we’ll talk a little more about theme
and how it relates to premise, the development of the premise, and
how it’s intertwined in the structure.)
For instance, in Groundhog Day as they’re driving up to
Punxsutawney, Chris Elliott turns to Bill Murray and says, “What
do you have against the groundhog? I covered the swallows going
back to Capistrano four years in a row.” And Bill Murray says, very
off handedly, “Somebody’s going to see me interviewing a ground-
hog and think I don’t have a future.” Which is, in fact, what’s going
to happen. Later on, the insurance salesman tells Bill Murray, “You
know some of my friends live by the actuarial tables. But my feeling
is it’s all one big crapshoot anyhoo.” These lines aren’t something that
make you go, “Oh, I get what the movie’s about!” But they’re thematic,
and resonate with reverberations that infuse theme into the scenes
and the script without hitting you over the head with it.
In Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo, the husband, Danny Aiello,
repeats throughout the movie, “Life is not like the movies! Life is
not like the movies!” While that does telegraph specifically what is
about to happen (the fictional character Jeff Daniels plays is going to

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T H E C O M I C H E R O ’ S J O U R N E Y K A P L A N

emerge from the screen and fall in love with Mia Farrow), in most
cases you needn’t be so overt and you can simply imply or allude to
what the theme is. In most cases, it’s better if you allow the audience
to discover the connections than if you just come out and tell them
what the theme is.
Somewhere in the normal world, somewhere in the first act, you
need to imply or hint at the theme.

REVIEW ING THE NOR M AL WORLD . . .

ººIn what way is your Comic Hero f lawed? What is your Hero aware
or unaware of?
ººWhat is your Hero’s initial goal? How is it selfish or short-sighted?
ººDescribe your Hero’s relationships, or lack thereof.
ººIs there a moment in which your Hero reveals a hint of the char-
acter they will transform into?
ººWhat loss did your Hero suffer either in the beginning of, or before,
the Normal World?

k k k

The Normal World exists to set up situations and themes, but most
importantly, to introduce us to your very special characters who are
going to be living in your world and telling your story.

18
3.
Dumb and Dumber . . . and
Dumberer

CHARACTERS IN COMEDY

“Half the people you know are below average.”

—Steven Wright

CHARACTER TYPES AND ARCHETYPES

There are a lot of ways to think about characters. Million-Dollar

Screenwriting author (and all-around great guy) Chris Soth and I once
co-taught a Comic Premise workshop. In talking about creating char-
acters for your narrative, Chris used a number of analogies—your
characters could be like The Wizard of Oz:
A mismatched group of outcasts befriends an innocent girl, and
when given a chance, they display courage, inventiveness, a brain,
a heart . . . and also some cowardly comic relief. Putting it another
way, your characters represent (emotionally) a child, a teenager,
and an adult.

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T H E C O M I C H E R O ’ S J O U R N E Y K A P L A N

Or your characters are like the characters in the Hundred Acre

Wood: Pooh is friendly and kind; Piglet is shy; Eeyore is a pessimist,
always expecting the worst, while Tigger is the exact opposite, exuber-
ant and adventurous, bringing boundless energy, joy, and optimism
into the scenario. (In Seinfeld, for instance, you can see that George
is an Eeyore and Kramer’s a Tigger.)

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 D umb and D umber  .   .   . and D umberer

The important idea is to create clear delineations between char-

acters so that you don’t have four Eeyores in a scene. And while it
seems self-evident that varied characters are necessary, a situation
I come across in many of the screenplays I consult on is that two or
three characters are actually the same person. They’re doing the same
thing; they have the same function in the story. I see this mistake
over and over again.
In my workshops, talking about characters and character develop-
ment, and in The Hidden Tools of Comedy, I reference the Commedia
dell’Arte, which literally means “comedy of the professional guild or
artists.” This was a theater form developed in Italy in the 1500s, in
which the “central figure was the performer rather than the writer.”
All the stories were based on a simple premise or scenario and then
completely improvised. Every story imaginable was told through the
agency of the specific character types, the same stock characters that
had been used since the time of the Greeks. Most of the characters
wore distinctive masks, and Commedia featured actors who were also
acrobats, dancers, musicians, orators, quick wits, and improvisers
possessing satirical skills as well as insights into human behavior.

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T H E C O M I C H E R O ’ S J O U R N E Y K A P L A N

The power of archetypes is that they represent universal behav-

iors. Carl Jung believed they were recognizable personalities
embedded in our unconscious, and therefore possessed greater
resonance for audiences than might otherwise be the case. These
types, and the comics that played them, tap into, as James Agee
put it, “that great pipeline of horsing around and miming which
runs back unbroken through the fairs of the Middle Ages at least
to Ancient Greece.” They included lecherous old men, dim young
lovers, crafty, tricky servants, academic gasbags, cowardly warriors
and womanizers, simpletons, sneaks, courtesans, and crackpots.
Some of the specific archetypes were:
ARLECCHINO (HARLEQUIN) was the best-known of the comic
servants of the Commedia. He could be the silly, dumb servant, like
Gilligan of Gilligan’s Island or he could be the clever, tricky servant,
like Bill Murray in Stripes. He was the head fool in a company of fools,
sometimes very stupid but with occasional moments of brilliance.
Think Jim Carrey, Robin Williams, or Charlie Chaplin.
Arlecchino was just one of the collection of clowns known as the
Zanni, originally just a single valet—Zanni (from which comes the
term zany)—and from which many comic types emerged. Just as
Eskimos have many words for snow in their language, Commedia fea-
tured many varieties of fools. SCAPINO was a more sexual, romantic
version of Arlecchino. BRIGHELLA (or PULCINELLA) was essentially
Arlecchino’s smarter and much more vindictive, aggressive older
brother, like Ralph Kramden in The Honeymooners, John Belushi
in Animal House or Danny McBride in Eastbound and Down. Sweet,
innocent PIERROT was the melancholy clown (Stan Laurel), some-
times played silently, like Harpo Marx. COLOMBINE was the Zanni
of the female characters. You’ll see versions of Colombine in Lucille
Ball from I Love Lucy, Grace from Will & Grace, and Kat Dennings
from Two Broke Girls.
As a group, the Zanni become a bumbling, fumbling, fraternity of
jokers—often in trios. The Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers, those
three goofy ghosts in Casper, the original Ghostbusters. Two strong,
complementary Zanni could become a duo: Zanni 1 and Zanni 2
22
 D umb and D umber  .   .   . and D umberer

could be Hope and Crosby, Laurel & Hardy, Abbott & Costello, Tina
Fey and Amy Poehler, Bosom Buddies, The Blues Brothers.
The character who played the lecherous old man, or the crabby
old man, or the hypochondriac old man, or the miserly old man was
PANTALONE. You see Pantalone in Archie Bunker and Basil Fawlty.
He often had a marriageable daughter, or a young wife, who often
deceived him. He thought he was the head of the household, but that
was usually . . .
MARINETTA was the female version of Pantalone, and often his
spouse. She could be the battleax wife, like Maude, or the strong single
woman like Murphy Brown. Roseanne was another type of Marinetta
(with a big dollop of Colombine).
Other characters included IL DOTTORE, or Doctor or Professor,
an academic gasbag who just blathered nonsense. He proudly
claimed to be a member of every academy but in reality was just a
pretentious bag of wind. IL CAPITANO was the cowardly soldier
or the braggart soldier—like Gaston in the Beauty and the Beast.
He often claimed to be fearless but was actually the opposite. Il
Capitano was originally of Spanish origin. (The Italians and the
French thought this was a hoot!) Sgt. Bilko was a combination
of Il Capitano and Pulcinella. And finally there was ISABELLA /
LEANDRO (the Innamorati or Young Lovers): Usually the offspring
of Pantalone, they were madly in love, but somewhat dim (like Woody
in Cheers, and Phoebe in Friends). Isabella and Leander were the
only ones who were unmasked. Except for them, everyone else in
Commedia had distinctive masks and costume.
That’s important because it meant, wherever you were in Europe,
whether you were in Naples or Prague or Stockholm or London, when
the guy with the hook nose and diamond patterned tights came out,
you knew that was Harlequin, and you could begin to predict what
was going to happen. Think of Marie charging into Ray’s house, or
Kramer bursting through the door into Jerry’s apartment. You see
Kramer sliding through the door and you’re already anticipating the
comedy that’s about to occur: that’s the power of Commedia. No mat-
ter where you were in Europe for hundreds of years, you knew who
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T H E C O M I C H E R O ’ S J O U R N E Y K A P L A N

these characters were. They were like watching favorite old sitcoms.
Ricky and Lucy Ricardo—you begin to anticipate what’s going to hap-
pen even if you’ve never seen that episode before.1

CHARACTERS CREATE . . .

So how does this work in reality? Say you have the characters of
the two young lovers acting out a scene. Let’s put them on a park
bench. They’re young, they’re a little dim. What’s their physical move-
ment? Toward each other, right? They’re going to hug; they’re going
to get together.
Now let’s say we replace the young man and let’s put in Pantalone,
the lecherous old man. Now, what’s the movement? He’s going to
lunge for the girl, and as she moves away, he’s going to chase her
around the bench. Now let’s take away the young girl and let’s replace
her with Marinetta, the battleax wife. Now the chase around the bench
is going in the opposite direction. Now let’s take both the old people
away and replace them with the three Zanni. They’re all going to
run away in different directions but BECAUSE THEY ARE IDIOTS,
they’re going to knock heads together and they’ll knock each other out!
So what does the Commedia teach us? The Commedia
teaches us that:
ººCharacter creates plot.
ººCharacter creates action.
ººCharacter creates movement.
The Commedia does this because it goes beyond focusing on funny
characters and focuses on relationships. In Keith Johnstone’s invalu-
able book Impro, he describes how important the concept of status is
in improvisation. In any relationship between characters, someone
is smarter than the other; someone is more powerful than the other;

1 
In discussing the importance of audiences knowing who the characters were, Mike Schur (of
Parks and Rec) said, “It takes a while to learn about the characters and enjoy their funny traits.
In the Cheers pilot, for example, Cliff is basically an extra. It wasn’t until a few episodes later that
they moved him to the other end of the bar and sat him next to Norm, forming the most famous
275-episode tableau in TV history.”

24
 D umb and D umber  .   .   . and D umberer

someone is the leader, the other the follower. Masters and servants,
husbands and wives, bosses and workers. Status, and the constant
negotiations that surround status, are the engine that propels action.
The slave wants his freedom from his master, but the master needs
his wily slave to fetch the charming young girl who is attracted to the
master’s money and power, but more attracted to his strapping young
son who is a bit dim and dependent upon the clever servant who is
trying to evade the vengeful captain whom he cheated at dice. This
shifting status war powered Renaissance Commedia and operas like
The Marriage of Figaro the same way that it powers stories of the nerds
and their girlfriends in The Big Bang Theory—Sheldon is a brilliant
physicist on track, at least in his own mind, to win the Nobel Prize but
he often leans on Penny, a not-so-brilliant Cheesecake Factory waitress,
to navigate the confusing conventions of social interactions.

CLOSED UNIVERSE

The Commedia also teaches us that comedy is a closed universe. The

old man wandering around the streets in Act One in a Commedia
always turns out to be the father of the orphans in Act Five—it’s a
closed, connected universe. If you’re doing a college football movie,
and the quarterback and the benchwarmer both like the same girl,
she’s probably also going to the same college, maybe even a cheer-
leader for the team. Maybe she’s even more closely connected to the
team, by being related to the coach. In Mean Girls, the guy in high
school that Cady (Lindsay Lohan) has a crush on is not some uncon-
nected hot senior football star, but the ex-boyfriend of mean girl
Queen Bee Regina (Rachel McAdams). Yes, theoretically you could
have a speaking role for all seven billion people on the planet, but
what Commedia teaches us is that you can tell an entire universe of
stories with a finite set of characters.

OUR ARCHETYPES

In The Writer’s Journey, Chris Vogler writes about the Hero, the
Mentor, the Threshold Guardian, the Herald, and so on.

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T H E C O M I C H E R O ’ S J O U R N E Y K A P L A N

In our Comic Hero’s Journey, our characters are slightly differ-

ent, and certainly less heroic. And it’s not just the main characters:
in a comedy, no one’s perfect.
Among our comic archetypes are the Fool, the Innocent, the Voice
of Reason, the Primal, the Magical Object of Desire, and probably the
most important, the Trickster.

THE FOOL

The Fool is a character who is naïve, sometimes stupid, and usu-

ally wrong about almost everything. In Tropic Thunder, Ben Stiller
is the Fool. Both Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels are obviously Fools in
Dumb and Dumber. The Fool in Mean Girls is Karen Smith (Amanda
Seyfried) who when told that Lindsay Lohan was homeschooled in
Africa asks, “If you’re from Africa, why are you white?” The charac-
ter doesn’t need to be a Fool from beginning to end or in all things,
but is the character you can call on to be a useful idiot when the
occasion demands.

In A Fish Called Wanda, Kevin Kline’s ex-CIA assassin is a danger-

ous man, but also obviously an idiot who hates being called stupid.

WANDA
Oh, right! To call you stupid would
be an insult to stupid people! I’ve
known sheep that could outwit you.

26
 D umb and D umber  .   .   . and D umberer

I’ve worn dresses with higher IQs.

But you think you’re an intellectual,
don’t you, ape?

OTTO WEST
Apes don’t read philosophy.

WANDA
Yes they do, Otto. They just don’t
understand it. Now let me correct
you on a couple of things, okay?
Aristotle was not Belgian. The
central message of Buddhism is not
“Every man for himself.” And the
London Underground is not a political
movement. Those are all mistakes,
Otto. I looked them up.

Kline’s character is an idiot who can be counted on to bring in

both danger and comedy in each scene he’s in.

THE INNOCENT

In romantic comedy, the Innocent might be the sweet, naïve one of

the group, like Ellie Kemper in Bridesmaids or the Object of Desire,
like Rita in Groundhog Day. The Innocent is not necessarily the dumb-
est person in the group, but they’re naive in the way that they approach
life. They’re the ones who need to be schooled about certain situations.
In The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Steve Carell is literally innocent; he’s still

27
 STEVE Kaplan
PERFORMING ARTS / FILM & VIDEO / SCREENWRITING $26.95 USA / $35.95 CAN

Kaplan
Turning The Zero The Comic
HERO’S
INTO THE HERO!

the comic HERO’S journey

journey
WE’VE ALL HEARD ABOUT THE HERO’S JOURNEY. But what about
the protagonist in a comedy? While other books give you tips on
how to “write funny,” The Comic Hero’s Journey details the crucial
differences between comedy-film story structure and the dramatic
Hero’s Journey. Learn the diverse paths that comedy takes for anyone
wanting to write better scripts and understand more clearly what
makes film comedy work!

“Steve Kaplan gives clear principles that will help you tell comedy
stories that are funny but also emotionally engaging.”
—Chris Vogler, author, The Writer’s Journey

“I absolutely loved it! Invaluable, insightful stuff

for anyone—writer, director, producer, or executive—
who takes writing comedy seriously.”
—Lee Jessup, author, Getting It Write

“Steve sheds a brilliant light on the comedic hero. To write

a comedy script that can’t be ignored, read this book.”
—Jen Grisanti, story / career consultant; writing instructor for NBC

STEVE KAPLAN, author of the bestselling book The Hidden Tools

of Comedy, is the industry's most sought-after expert on comedy
writing and production. He has taught at UCLA, NYU, and the Yale
School of Drama; created the HBO Workspace and the HBO New
Writers Program; and was co-founder and Artistic Director of
Manhattan Punch Line Theatre. He has also taught workshops for
companies such as Disney Animation, DreamWorks, and Sony
Pictures Network India.

Serious Story Structure

for Fabulously Funny Films
MICHAEL WIESE PRODUCTIONS | MWP.COM